This week’s Edge City starts a three-week series dealing with the Holocaust. In the series, the family visits a local barber who was a holocaust surviver. In an interview with King Features, the strip’s co-creator Terry LaBan says that it’s a topic they’ve wanted to do before but until now, hadn’t found a way to make it fit into the strip.
Is the story based on a true story or real people? Or is purely fictional?
It’s an amalgam of a several true stories. Patty worked for four years with an organization that helped Holocaust survivors in the Philadelphia area get aid and benefits, and she got to know quite a few pretty well. All of them had incredible stories and several actually did spend time fighting with partisans in the forest. There was also a barber in the neighborhood where we lived in Chicago who had survived Auschwitz. I didn’t go to him, but I had a friend who did and I passed by his shop many times. I’d look in the window, and I could see the numbers on his arm, and I was intrigued by the image of those arms giving me a haircut. Interestingly, after we wrote the story, Patty was communicating with one of the survivors she knew. He told her he had been offered the chance to hide in a village-he’d even been engaged to the mayor’s non-Jewish daughter!-but he’d turned it down because he couldn’t stand the thought of giving up his Jewishness. It was very similar to what happens in our story, but we had come up with that on our own.
Is Edge City Jewish leaning or something like that?